Boxes are commonly used in transporting, moving, conveying, sorting and storing goods and materials, and are employed by a diversity of industries such as trucking, warehousing, manufacturing, office moving and household goods moving.
Large-capacity containers are used for easy transfer of goods and cargo from one transporting vehicle to another or for shipping cargo overseas or overland.
Containers have been universally adopted for the transportation of cargo because this form of shipment has eliminated the need for transferring the cargo manually or by conventional means from one vehicle to another during the transport to a certain destination.
The main disadvantage of conventional containers which are formed by a rigid prismatic structure results from the fact that after use and delivery, the empty containers must be transported from their destination to a point of loading from where they are shipped back to points of re-use.
The requirement to reposition empty containers is one of the more persistent problems in the container transport industry. Empty container transport involves high costs, particularly for shipping lines, since they generally bear these container management costs. Not surprisingly, shipping lines try to reduce the costs of moving empty containers as much as they can. Most strategies are focused on matching cargo with empty containers. Due to trade imbalances transport movements of empty containers remain to some extent unavoidable.
These operations are economically disadvantageous because the empty container, which is a rigid structure, occupies in the transporting means a space which otherwise could be occupied by containers with cargo.
Therefore, foldable containers are an attractive option from the point of view of saving transport costs as well as handling and storage costs. So far, however, such containers have not been introduced successfully.
In order to eliminate these disadvantages resulting from the use of rigid-structure, prismatic containers, containers with collapsible structure components have been designed and built. In such containers the walls can be folded onto the base so that after discharge of the cargo, the empty container will occupy less space in the collapsed state for transport.
Containers with folding walls usually comprise reinforcing or retaining members of the walls. These members may get lost and therefore may cause serious inconvenience in the assembly or unloading of such containers with complicated structure elements.
Collapsible containers of this type are a solution to the problem of dead space occupied once the cargo has been delivered since in the collapsed state, the height of the containers is substantially reduced and at least four collapsible containers can be transported in place of one rigid container.
When special designs are incorporated in the hinge joints to prevent the entry of foreign material, it is hard to obtain the required sealing effect because in prolonged use of the containers, a number of problems develop at the hinge joints. The problems and failures cause additional expenses with the resulting disadvantages in the handling of this type of cargo containers. U.S. Pat. No. 4,177,907 relates to a shipping container for the transport of goods. This container has all its walls connected together by means of hinges and thus in the folding down operation, as in the reverse one of erection, no wall is completely freed from the remaining ones. It discloses that the maneuvers consequently become quicker and safer and the structure of the container assumes greater rigidity in comparison with those containers in which one or more walls have to be detached completely. This container on folding/collapsing folds vertically down to the base.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,630,746 provides an improved collapsible, stackable storage or shipping container in which the respective walls, end sections and corresponding hinge elements by which the sections are pivotally connected are all formed of a molded plastic material and wherein each of the corresponding adjacent pivotally connected walls or wall sections and their corresponding aligned hinge elements are interconnected by transverse pivot pins of plastic or metal.
However, the above-mentioned patents do not disclose a foldable transport container which substantially folds horizontally against a side wall and in which the process of folding can be facilitated using external automatic apparatus.